Johnson: 'The Butler' illustrates generational divide

However, the opening line could have also come from poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who penned these soul-stirring words regarding the subservient status of blacks in 1895: “We wear the mask that grins and lies,/ It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.”

Cecil Gaines, the butler in the film, served seven U.S. presidents. He learned to “wear the mask” at an early age, after seeing his father mercilessly gunned down in Macon, Ga., by a cotton-field overseer. The matriarch of the plantation takes pity on young Cecil and removes him from the field to teach him how to be a “house n-----.” She orders him to serve only, and to hear and see nothing.

“The room should feel empty when you’re in it,” was the fundamental, and most critical, part of her instruction to the young Gaines. It encapsulated the 1920s survival manual for black servants in the Deep South that Gaines would carry with him all the way to the White House.

Although Gaines is a fictional character, the film is inspired by the life of Eugene Allen, a White House butler who began his service in the Truman administration. Through the film, viewers get a poignant, albeit tightly packaged, 82 years of black history culminating in the 2008 election of President Barack Obama.

The most dynamic part of the storyline is the generational clash between Cecil and his son Louis, who comes of age during the civil rights movement.

Forest Whitaker portrays Cecil with a composed acquiescence, a man who knows his place and respects those who have authority over him. While serving in the White House, Cecil conditions himself to fit within the unjust confines of his second-class status. Not only is he wearing the mask, but he is socially concealed in the presence of white men, much like the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”

The tension between Cecil and Louis brilliantly illustrates the social strain in many African-American families during the 1950s and 1960s, when the tenets of institutionalized racism were being challenged. As a teenager, Louis is deeply torn by the treatment of blacks in the South and the comfortable lifestyle his father has been able to provide for him, his mother and younger brother.

Watching Louis’ internal struggle with these two different worlds, we relive the courageousness of the Little Rock Nine and the torment of Emmett Till. When Louis enrolls at Fisk University, we get on the bus with the Freedom Riders.

The breaking point in the relationship between Cecil and Louis occurs when Louis joins the Black Panthers out of frustration and anger after Dr. King is killed.

Louis believes that King’s approach to civil rights was too passive, the mentality Louis associates with his father’s generation. Caught up in this turbulent shift of the movement, Louis implies that Cecil is an Uncle Tom, but eventually discovers that the militancy of the Panthers goes against his moral convictions.

What resonated most for me while viewing “The Butler” was the reconciliation between Cecil and Louis, which took more than 20 years. It was not until the protests of South African apartheid in the 1980s that Cecil finally realized that his son was not a criminal. Louis, in turn, came to the understanding that his father was not docile and weak.

At the end of the film, I thought about many of the conversations I had when I was younger with college and grad school classmates concerning the historic role of black servants. Someone would always assert that they would not have yielded to the racial code of those times, but it’s easier to say what you would not do when you never had to do it.

The real Eugene Allens, the black men Cecil Gaines’ character represents, were not Uncle Toms. They were the unseen heroes whose sacrifices ensured that I would not be invisible.

• Jessica Johnson, a 1987 graduate of Clarke Central High School, is a correspondent for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.